Stardew Valley:
Rabite Pet
Latest Release - 16/05/2024
Version - 1.1.3
A mod for Stardew Valley that adds rabites from the Mana series as a cute new pet!
Version 1.1.0 adds four alternate colours of rabite to choose from, bringing the total up to seven.
Requires Content Patcher
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(Also available on Nexus)
I made this mod as a tangent when working on my Primm in Stardew mod, as I felt like having these cute enemies as pets could stand on its own as a separate mod.
I took the assets from Heroes of Mana (which I'd forgotten that I owned), as it's the only mana game with 16 by 16 sprites for the enemy. I couldn't find any spritesheets from the game, nor had anyone reverse-engineered the asset format for the game yet, so I fired the game up in an emulator and dumped its VRAM to get all the sprites I needed.
The next step was to compile these into a spritesheet and write step-by-step animations for each behaviour (and a mirror of each, too).This file ended up being an impressive 1000 lines long, which made it tough to scour through when looking for errors. I also added a range of gifts your pet can give you if you reach maximum friendship with it, as well as the cutscene where you're offered the chance to adopt a rabite if you select it at the start of the game. The rabites also have a sound they make when pet, and I'll have a lot of respect for anyone who recognises where it's sourced from.
For version 1.1.0, the creator of Hats On Pets Plus approached me and asked if I could implement compatibility with their framework to allow hats to be worn by the rabites. After suggesting an improvement to the framework, I happily added support and I was still inspired to work some more on the mod. Therefore I decided to add some more colour variants, this time inspired by species of rabite from across the whole Mana series.
In later updates, I added the rabite to the pets section of the perfection cutscene. This led to me contributing to the CJB Cheats Menu mod to add a cheat to satisfy the stronger perfection checks introduced in version 1.6, so I could more easily test this addition. Someone also offered to translate the cutscene into French, so I also implemented internationalisation functionality and added the French translation.
I think this mod turned out very cute and is a great vanilla-esque addition to the farm. I'm also very impressed by how far this mod has come since its initial update, as I didn't have any plans to update it when initially developing the mod.
